Saturday, June 30, 2012

The fire is set before dawn but this isn’t going to be
very much of a blaze. This is land
clearing, pure and simple, and I can either hack the mass of vines to death or
I can burn them. There are three sizable Oaks in the middle of the island of
vines and thicket. I have to be careful because there are some low hanging
branches smothered with Spanish Moss. Many years ago I set fire to a branch of
a dead Oak that had been laid low by moss. The moss went up in flames like it
had been soaked in napalm and the flames very quickly climbed to other limbs
that had moss on them, also.The whole
tree was engulfed in flames that lit up the sky and as a young teen I feared I would
go to prison for the rest of my life. But I was lucky; the trees around the
torched Oak were still green enough to resist the fire. Their leaves were
browned somewhat but they all lived and no one ever discovered what I did.

In the dead of winter on a crisp clear night there might
be little chance of a fire jumping from a dead Oak to a Live Oak, but on a day
where there is triple digit heat there may well be some sort of disaster if
this fire gets into the moss high above. I use a rake to get some of the moss
down but the majority of it hangs onto the branch like a vast grey tick. I’ll
have to be careful and hope this doesn’t end with a fire truck visiting the
area.

Hack, rake, burn, repeat, and the morning begins to fade
away a warm up. Most of the stuff I’m trying to get rid of is green so this is
no massive fire at all. The wild grape vines which have created a canopy over the
area get pulled down into the fire. The old dead limbs I’ve been tossing into
this area for the last ten years burn slowly for most of them have turned into
mush. I clear enough area and rediscover
the old stump of a wild cherry tree.

I remember taking that tree down the first month I was
here. It had died and it looked like it might hit the house if left to its own
devices. There is an art to tree dropping, and this one fell perfectly, down to
the last inch, and I remember how happy I was that it fell so incredibly well. There’s a photo somewhere of Bert standing
with this two front feet on the fallen tree, as if he helped, and he’s only two
years old in that photo. Bert was good
to have around when I was working in the yard. He liked being in the action but
he never got in the way, once he figured out when he was. It’s hard to believe he’s
been gone for almost two months now.

Bert had a hammer for a voice and I miss that. I miss the
fact he knew when to bark and what to bark at. He once laid it down when the
oven caught on fire and Sam, poor confused Sam, went to the window and barked
at nothing while Bert stayed in the kitchen trying to tell me there was a fire
where it didn’t belong.He was fearless
in that way; Bert never questioned his own judgment when he came to security. I wish I still had that photo of the puppy
standing on top of the felled tree. That was my dog.

I dare not burn the stump for it might reach far into the
ground. Such a fire might go to ground and not even so much as smoke until it
woke up in the middle of the night and began to creep forward into the woods. I
have seen that before. A friend of mine set fire to a stump and the fire
followed a root out past the clear area and got wild into some planted pines.
It was two days after the fire was supposed to be completely out and not a hint
of smoke arose from the ashes and then suddenly there was a blaze. It took an
entire day to contain the fire and nearly a hundred acres of trees were
destroyed by the fire. No one could figure out where the fire had come from
until they dug down and found the place where it had traveled. A fire
underground can be the hardest to find, and nearly impossible to kill. The fires
that plagued the great Okefenokee Swamp were fires that dug down deep into the
peat moss of The Swamp and burned hot and smoky. It tunneled and nested and it
did things people did not think fire could do or would do and it took a
tropical storm to put it out.I am fully
aware of the danger in that stump but I would not burn it even if I could.
There is a piece of my life in that stump. I was a much younger man and Bert
was a puppy, and I did not foresee the day I would look at that stump and see
Bert standing on a felled tree a decade hence.

The fire burns lazy and slow. It’s really three small
fires and there is little danger it will escape, but as noon approaches I can
feel the heat of the day building up.It’s
time to let the fire recede and return to the place where fire sleeps, always
ready to spring forth and devour, unless you’ve got one match left at a cook
out. I’ve burned down to the ground, the
moss scorched from the trees and the vines withered away with flame now. It is
time to quit for the day and let the sun, a fire in and of itself, have the
world.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

A woman’s dress with tell on her if she isn’t careful or the
dress is too thin or if it’s too short, or if it is just too low. But then
again, a woman’s body inside of a dress with tell on her, too, if a man is
paying attention. Who she likes and how
much she likes that man can show up pretty quick if she’s built for it in any
way at all, and this one is. I can tell what she’s thinking sometimes because
she doesn’t like wearing a bra, and I wonder if that’s why. This is a woman who
likes sex, but she doesn’t like to initiate the action overtly. She’s doesn’t
like to be pressured yet she does like being pursued. Sometimes I think she
likes saying no just to prove she can say it, and when she does it’s final. And
there’s other times it seems she is willing to do anything I want if I just say
so. But she wears that dress easy, and the dress seems to enjoy being worn the
way she wears it.

I’ve never seen her in a pair of jeans but I do like the
idea of that body being slipped into denim. She isn’t too thin, isn’t too
broad, isn’t too anything but short, and she is also a little sensitive about
that so I never mention it aloud. I once held a beer up over her head and she
kicked me hard in the knee for it. So the shortness factor never comes up in a
conversation, and I never mention the fact she is dead, either. She stopped
speaking to me for nearly a year the last time I mentioned it, and it was an
accident I did.

Sam is her favorite, and always has been, and Lucas doesn’t
understand it at all. He’s worlds more cute than Sam, and he’s larger, more
energetic, and he’s the Loki Mutt. Why would anyone love Sam more? But she does
and it shows. She’ll pet Lucas and speak softly to him but there is a strong
attachment between her and Sam.

“Don’t go spinning them webs at me,” she told me once when I
tried to analyze why she likes Sam so much. She also wears a tone of voice like
no one I’ve ever met. She tries hard to keep me here, in this moment with her,
and I know better than to find some sort of depth. We’re here. We’re together.
Time is slipping away. Don’t ask questions unless they matter to this moment.

The dress has buttons in the back not a zipper, and when all
five of them are buttoned to the top it means she’s gone to some trouble to
make sure they stay that way, and I am to understand that. One undone isn’t
necessarily an invitation, but three is. Anything past three and I better not
let that go unnoticed for very long. But the dress itself is a soft and cotton
thing, pale blue with tiny white flowers on it. I can read her mind by the way
her body lives inside that dress. Her shoulders tell me how tense she is, or
how willing she is to be touched, or if she isn’t interested in intimacy quite
yet because Sam needs to be petted on a dog’s head. I’m having these thoughts,
watching her cooing at Sam, and I wonder if I can tell as much about what a
woman is thinking when she’s in a pair of jeans. I remember watching a woman
walk out of a room one night, going to the kitchen to makes us another drink,
if she knew I was watching, wanted me to watch, and I wondered while she was
walking if the idea that I could read her mind in her jeans made her…

“You think I’m that one?” She’s grinning at me as if she can
read my mind now. She laughs at me, reassures Sam she isn’t stopping the
petting, pushes Lucas’ ears playfully, and then looks at me seriously. “Your
singer. You think that’s me?”

“No, the voice is different, and the body, the…” I hesitate.
I dreamed of a redheaded woman who sang to me. “…she wasn’t the same person.”

“Who do you think she is?” She stands up and walks to the
window, only one button undone, and I wonder why she chose this moment to turn
her back to me, after my daydream.

“I don’t really know who you are.” And I don’t.

“You have an idea who you might be, Mike?” She says this
softly as if she’s sorry she brought this up. “Take away that machine you write
with and then what?” She returns to sit at the edge of the bed, and looks at
Lucas’ neck. She rubs the scabbed part and looks up as if she is waiting for me
to say something.

“I couldn’t quit writing, you know that.” So many times,
like this time, I’ve felt I hadn’t said the right thing at the right time.

“That singer,” she smiles at me, comforting me the same ways
she puts a hand on Sam’s head, “what did you ask of her?”

“Nothing”

“And you remember her fondly, want to see her again, want to
hear her voice again, maybe learn who she is?” She kisses Sam’s head and Lucas
rolls on the floor, striking the cutest of all cute puppy poses, all four legs
flailing the air. She rubs his belly with a bare foot and Sam nudges her with
his nose.

“You’re saying that asking something of someone is the way
to stop liking them?”

“I’m saying that and more, Mike. Why don’t you do something
different? Why don’t you pretend for one day of your life it is real, and let
it do what it wants. You’d write, so you say, no matter what, you’d write with
a stick in red clay mud, wouldn’t you, yet here is all this magic and all you
do is sit and wonder.” She slips to the floor to pet Lucas and Sam whines at
her and lifts his left forepaw in the air.

“Rain’s, stopped Mike.” She closes her eyes and leans her
head back on the bed. “I wanted more out of tonight…”

It’s still dark outside. The coffee maker is perking at me,
and the dogs have gone outside to snuffle the remains of the night, and if I
close my eyes I can see the pattern of tiny white flowers in the dark of my
mind.

Monday, June 25, 2012

She’s very young, no more than eighteen or nineteen, but she
already knows how to work the tiny area at the coffee shop.Smile, lean forward just a bit, hope for a
tip of some sort, and back to the kitchen where she has some serious
conversation going with the other waitress. They stand close together, hands
touching a shoulder or a waist, but this isn’t sexual; it’s the type of
intimacy between friends young women share. Men this same age aren’t as apt to
touch one another, but between these two there is a shared sisterhood if
nothing else, gossip.

The blonde isn’t a small woman at all. She’s a thick
bodied creature but she is also graceful. She isn’t overweight just not
slender. It’s a body type that will follow her all her life, and there is
evidence she’s working out.This one has
real muscle tone in her quads. I haven’t seen her at the Y but it could be
she’s working out elsewhere.She’s
dressed entirely in white, but her bra is a beige color.I find myself fascinated by the idea someone
so young is already using her sexuality for tips, but looking back at my own
life, I knew much younger women who did the same thing. Put a sixteen year old in a family restaurant
in South Georgia and she’ll learn very fast a smile is not just a smile. Done
well a smile is worth a couple of dollars more than just a smile. Show some
teeth, show enough cleavage to make them look for more, and hope like hell mama
isn’t watching when you lean over.Oh
yeah, I knew one who did this, and did it well.

The blonde giggles with her partner in crime but realizes
she’s being inattentive. She looks back into the small area where there are
half a dozen tables and looks down at her pad to see who has what and when they
came in.This is a different world than
the one I knew when I was in the restaurant business.The pad she carries in a minicomputer and it has
an overview of the dining area and the orders are all done electronically.There’s even a picture of the customer
superimposed over each table and I wonder how much information it saves. Get
the same customer in several times and your pad can remember the weak spots
like cinnamon rolls or extra shots of espresso.But the blonde doesn’t seem to be predatory right now; the other woman
has her attention with whatever it they’re conspiring over.The blonde checks her pad, goes forth with
refills of regular coffee, leans over to see what I am writing, realizes my
handwriting is indecipherable, and heads back with a flourish.

This one has a natural walk. Her hips roll in a way that
suggests she hasn’t practiced walking the way some women have. There’s a degree
of swing that becomes fake and it’s cumbersome to watch.She doesn’t have the body for that
exaggerated rock and I don’t know if she’s ever tried it and quit, or never
thought about it at all.I know a woman
who has a back and forth motion that is nearly comical. It’s one thing to look
like that in the movies but quite another when you’re at work.

Her friend is another matter altogether. She’s working
the cash register and she’s more outgoing and more active.She’s going full tilt on the flirty thing and
it’s working with some of the guys who order.I know better, but I didn’t always. There have been times in my life I’ve
been worked for tips and never knew it, but those days are gone forever. I just
want some coffee and to write, and to watch the blonde for a bit.

“You okay?” The blonde has snuck up on me.She has the refill carafe and a smile. She’s also got
the pad tucked into a pouch. I ask about it and she shows it to me about the
time the other women shrieks out loud. An obscene message very lewdly
suggesting I’m lusting after the blonde pops up on the screen right as she
turns it towards me. The blonde reads it at the same time I do and she says,
“Oh my god!” and flees.The other woman
heads out to where my table is, retreats, apologizes profusely and is nearly
knocked down by the retreating blonde who has turned a shade of red not found
anywhere else in nature.

I should go, I know, and make it easy on both of them,
but what’s life if you can’t have a little fun? Yet getting the blonde out of
the backroom will take some doing, and the other woman, well, she’s withdrawn
to the cash register and even from a distance I can tell she’s also burning
red. I’m fairly certain I could simply walk out without paying my bill and
those two would gladly never say a word but I cannot resist.

“How much do I owe you?’ I say blandly and the woman is
to the point of tears. The sheer embarrassment factor here is bad enough, but
she also has to worry about getting fired, and maybe even the blonde killing
her at this point.

“LookImterriblysorryIdidntmeanforyoutoseethatpleasedontgetmefirediamsososososossorryillpayforyourcoffeeokaythanks”
and I can tell she would rather do anything on earth than have this conversation
with me right now. She is as distressed as she can possibly get and still have
her clothes on.

“Okay, just tell me if this breaks into your top ten most
embarrassing moments of your life.”I
stand there and she sighs. I will not go away instantly, but there is some
relief. I’m not yelling or angry and that does help.

“Easily,” she says trying to smile, “I”ll pay for your
coffee, okay?’ Please, please, please leave and never come back I just want to
die, is what she would like to say.

“What’s your manager’s name?” I ask and her face changes
colors again, this time it’s a deeper red than ever before.She has to resign herself to the agony of
someone else seeing what she sent, or at least hearing about it.

“Steve.” And with this I can see a little anger in her.
She’s ready to start fighting back, and it’s time to let her off the hook.

“Tell Steve he hired a psychic.” It takes her a couple of
seconds to realize what I mean, but as I walk out the door she bursts into real
laughter.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

This is a
list of ten songs I never want to hear again, but I know I will:

In ascending order of irritation magnitude…

10. Any song Eric Clapton wrote for a dead
relative. He wrote “Tears from Heaven” for his son who was killed in a tragic
accident, and “My Father’s Eyes” for his father, who I heard he never met. Both
songs were so overplayed when they came out that I can’t listen to either
without wanting to stomp a radio to death with my bare feet.

9. Any song Elton John sings about a dead blonde.
“Candle in the wind” was for Monroe then Diana. Come on man, you’ve got more
number one hits than anyone else and you have to recycle one? Please.

8. “The Pina Colada Song (Escape)” by Rupert
Holmes. Back in the day this song was just left playing by radio stations day
and night because that’s the only song anyone wanted to hear. I can’t drink a
Pina Colada without wanting to throw up but there is no escape.

7. “Margaritaville” by
Jimmy Buffet. Some people say there’s a women to blame but I know it’s his own
damn fault. A person can’t go to Florida and drink without this song coming on
a juke box. I was sick of it two decades ago.

6. “Funky Town” by Lipps
Inc. This was a song I hated the first time I heard it. Someone remade it a few
years back and I hated it all over again. It’s just irritating, plain and
simple.

5. “Train” by Blacksnake.
This was one of those songs everyone loved so much some of us started to hate
it. Then one night a drunk I knew started singing it, and by the end of the evening
he puked out the car window and splattered me because I was in the backseat. I
hosed off in someone’s front yard and since then when I hear that song I smell
the puke of an idiot in the air.

4. “I Will Always Love You”
Whitney Houston. The video of this song fascinated me because Houston looks
like she’s sitting on a toilet having some sort of mouth spasm. But really, I
was with a male co-worker one day and he stopped to play this song full blast
and was explaining to my why this was his song for his ex-wife, even though she
had cheated on him, took his money, and left him with nothing. I thought it a
poor idea to sit with another guy and listen to that song loud enough for
people to hear it. Houston was a drunk, an addict, and had marginal talent. The
fact that she died right before the Emmys does not make her special.

3. “Staying Alive” by the
Bee Gees. This song marked a new low in music all over the world and in the
United States it marked the beginning of a very long dry spell where there wasn’t
an album worth using for target practice. If there was a song that is the
musical equivalent of the Nazi takeover of Europe, this is that song.

2. “Stairway to Heaven” by
Led Zeppelin. The lyrics are nonsensical. They do not mean anything special or
important, Satanic, magical or mystical. It’s a long, long, song that has been
played far too long. Stop it.

1.“Free Bird” by Lynyrd
Skynyrd. This is a song that is played over and over by rednecks like they’re
four year olds playing some Disney DVD incessantly. At bars, parties, outdoor
events, you name it, at some time some moron wearing a three wolves howling
tee-shirt draped over his belly is going to struggle to his feet, lift a butane
lighter to the heavens and scream, “Free Bird!” When the song was sold to the soul duo “Peaches
and Herb” some of the magic wore off a bit, but it is still the most overplayed
song in the South. It really wouldn’t be so bad except for those people who
seem to think “Free Bird” is like the national anthem or something. You may
love it, and everyone you know may love it, but there comes a time when you
just have to realize music did not stop in 1977.

Summer in South Georgia means the temperature is going to be
close to eighty even at three in the morning. Gone for another one hundred days or so are the
cool sunrises that are bug free and refreshing. This is like waking up in the mouth of a drunk
who lives under an overpass. The air in warm and sticky and even if you shower
in the morning just walking outside to pee makes you feel like you’ve been
hanging out in a locker room with the fat guys at the Y. Dawn is a couple of
hours away but there isn’t anything in the air that resembles night but the dark.

There was more burning yesterday but it wasn’t much
fun.I was tired when I started and I
never really got into a groove at all. I cut a path to the pond, realized a
fire there would have to wait until there was more time to burn, ha ha, and
worked on clearing the fence line instead. There are a lot of really large
weeds in that fenceline, and there’s an old dead tree that fell a few years
ago. I remember that tree fell one day when I was out in the yard working.Or more precisely it fell while I was having
lunch inside and when I went back outside there was a tree down. It wasn’t very
large, mind you, but it would have killed me had it landed on me. It landed on
the first fence I put up and never took down once I got the rest of the
property closed up. Now the fence has to be removed and the dead tree too, and into
the fire it goes.

This is the day of the Dead Tree and the stuff that has
built up over the years has to go. This will not be a fun fire because old wood
burns poorly and weakly, too. I’m a big fan of letting things go back to nature
but if I am to clear this fenceline this stuff has to go. I’m pushing nature
back another twenty feet or so and making the backyard more accessible to the
birds of prey that grab snakes.I’m also
clearing away some low hanging branches and I realize when this is all over
with my yard will look a lot like I’ve never really wanted it to look.

Next year I might turn some of this open area into a
garden, and plant some peach trees. I’m turning a lot of the stuff I’m raking
up into mulch so by next spring there ought to be plenty. There is a growing
pile of rich black soil in the mulch pile and this year I planted peppers and
tomatoes again, and hopefully they’ll do well. Once again I waited a little
late and should have gotten them out a month earlier.

Fire is a strange thing. I’ve seen people use diesel fuel
to start fires to clear land but they wind up with land that smells like diesel
fuel. I use old leaves instead, and I can get a fire to walk on the ground, in
the direction I want, simply by feeding leaves to the fire. This kills off the
underbrush, the thick stuff, and the briars that grow around here with stems as
thick as my thumb. The vines that have attached themselves to the young Oaks,
which I am leaving, curl up and wither. But the fire will go where it wants, and where
the wind blows so I must be careful. I can’t leave this one alone and hope it
will turn out well. But the fire moves
in and out of the fenceline, burning everything I want it too, clearing away a
decade of weeds, and opening up more space. To get into the backyard now means
having to cross over a wide plain with no cover.

If I expand the mulch pile then I’ll put it near the
firepit, which makes sense. But this
means killing off the weeds in that area and that means the yearly bloom of
tiny white flowers will never be again. The vines they spring from explode out
of the ground in late Summer and suddenly it looks like snow when they blossom.
They climb and intertwine around the dog
fennel and I hope to keep some of them but…

Lucas is healing well. The wound on his neck is nearly
healed and he hasn’t been slowed down at all because of this. He’s off all his
meds now and the swelling is long gone. I was told the hair would not grow back
but as the would heals it looks like it will, in fact grow back just like it
always was, without so much as a scar. The bite was not as bad as the one
suffered by another dog who was brought in the day after Lucas. That one didn’t
make it and his parents have to deal with making changes in their lives now,
much like I am doing, but in a much worse way. The vet told me they wanted to
save him, no matter what it cost, but the dog was small, the snake large, and
the venom too much.

There have been many snake bit dogs this year, more
snakes seen than normal, and more venomous snakes around than I remember. Elbow
has complained about the rat snakes in her henhouse and the vipers around her
yard.The vet told me she has treated
three dogs for bite this year.Lucas got
bit and not a week later I evicted another Cottonmouth. I cannot explain it.

My only theory is we had a very wet spring and perhaps
the wet weather along with the very hot May we had built up more ground cover
for them to move around in and closer too. The ones I have seen have been of
various sizes and it’s not like they migrate.So the Year of the Dead Tree, the Year of the Snake, and the Year of the
Fire continues.

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About Me

The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.